Effects of a Ross Perot victory in 1992?

RousseauX

Donor
And the establishment candidates who defect to reform wouldn’t get any support if the reform party is all about being populist and anti establishment. Also the more people running in the primary the better for Trump. This is current politics but if you watch the 2016 primary debates he definitely won the debates with a ton of people by a long shot
1) The American political establishment -wasn't- all that unpopular back in the mid 90s-early 2000s: it was the Iraq War, the 2008 recession, and the disappointment in the Obama presidency from the left and perceived folding over immigration on the right (gang of eight 2013) which killed faith in establishment type politicians.

2) Don't estimate the ability of politicians to re-brand themselves, someone starting out very establishment-esque might well become an anti-establishment candidate through good marketing: good example of this is Ronald Reagan
 

RousseauX

Donor
Trump spent the 90's trying and failing to avoid bankruptcy and he doesn't have the public exposure created by The Apprentice yet. he's not going to be a presidential candidate.
yeah this is the other thing, w/o the apprentice's TRUMP is far less capable of winning serious primaries because

1) lower name recognization

2) no image of executive experience among the average US primary voter

I actually don't think pre-apprentice/pre-social media TRUMP is likely to win a GE or even a serious party primary
 
Not just these sentences but in general tone throughout the extrapolation, I feel you are indulging a whole boatload of right wing assumptions about how things work. I personally, as someone who lived through the 1990s as well as the decades before and after with legal adult status, doubt very much these would be the sociological outcomes. Of course to get a Perot victory in the first place, as opposed to him acting as a spoiler, you need to make some pretty radical changes in how people voted; I don't suppose Jerry Brown campaigning harder would cut it.

I note for instance you practically begin with Perot going after Whitewater. Well, gosh, it's 2018, what is the total cumulative evidence on Whitewater that we have in form of hard fact today as opposed to mere emotional animus against the Clintons for existing?
Yes, you are correct, once events get to the 1996 Election, I can't determine what will play out, and so I thought the only way to get a continuance of the Perot administration is to make the assumptions I did. With respect to the Whitewater Investigation, nothing is likely to come of it (as you suggest), but Bill Clinton will not have the prestige of being the President during the investigation, so yes I assume the "emotional animus" will actually prevent his campaign. Actually I think Perot would go to a great deal of effort to tarnish Clinton's name to prevent him from becoming a challenger in 1996. As a change of course from Ross Perot I think Bill Clinton would be a very good candidate in 2000, but again I assumed that without the prestige of the Presidency, he will appear as a tarnished figure in comparison to people like Gephardt or Biden. I haven't read the rest of your post yet.
 
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yeah this is the other thing, w/o the apprentice's TRUMP is far less capable of winning serious primaries because

1) lower name recognization

2) no image of executive experience among the average US primary voter

I actually don't think pre-apprentice/pre-social media TRUMP is likely to win a GE or even a serious party primary

Trump has been a household name since around the early-to-mid 1980s, hence his various talk show appearances, commercial and movie cameos over a thirty or more year period. Had he entered any presidential election from, say, 1988 to 2016 he would have always been one of the best-known candidates. The Apprentice was just the icing on the cake as far as his fame went.
 
I find some of the replies here, quite frankly, flabbergasting. We literally have an analogue RIGHT NOW of a third party Presidency with a similar foreign/economic policy, and that's with Trump.

Essentially, Perot (if he did win) would have a Presidency akin to Trump. His natural ideological allies (the Republicans) would be ignoring him and unlike Trump, executive powers would be less expanded. This is before NAFTA, so the idea the President could just unilaterally decide tariffs and trade policies did not exist in 1992.

Unlike Trump, who essentially does verbal judo so that when the media attacks him, he turns this into a positive for himself, Perot did not have this ability (because unlike Trump, he has some personal dignity.) So, he'd definitely be a one term President, even more of a lame duck. He'd be pretty much remembered as a Jimmy Carter figure. A nice guy who couldn't get crap done. Next President is probably a Democrat, and it's hard to imagine the US liberalizing its trade policy with a Perot victory in 1992, simply because going neo-liberal economically would likely get one destroyed by the general electorate.
 

RousseauX

Donor
I find some of the replies here, quite frankly, flabbergasting. We literally have an analogue RIGHT NOW of a third party Presidency with a similar foreign/economic policy, and that's with Trump.

Essentially, Perot (if he did win) would have a Presidency akin to Trump. His natural ideological allies (the Republicans) would be ignoring him and unlike Trump, executive powers would be less expanded. This is before NAFTA, so the idea the President could just unilaterally decide tariffs and trade policies did not exist in 1992.

Unlike Trump, who essentially does verbal judo so that when the media attacks him, he turns this into a positive for himself, Perot did not have this ability (because unlike Trump, he has some personal dignity.) So, he'd definitely be a one term President, even more of a lame duck. He'd be pretty much remembered as a Jimmy Carter figure. A nice guy who couldn't get crap done. Next President is probably a Democrat, and it's hard to imagine the US liberalizing its trade policy with a Perot victory in 1992, simply because going neo-liberal economically would likely get one destroyed by the general electorate.
First of all, stuff passed under Trump, I mean not a lot but stuff did get passed.

I think what you are missing in this analogue is the degree to which US politics was less partisan in the 1990s compare to today. This isn't the 2010s where the Republicans won't give Obama anything no matter what.

Would the Republicans/democrats in congress really ignore him if he basically says he'll pass some of their agenda just to create a failed presidency? Gingrich could have done that to Clinton after 1994 but he didn't. So I'm guessing if Perot promise to pass deregulation or a crime bill he'll get support in congress for it.

He'd be pretty much remembered as a Jimmy Carter figure.
jimmy carter gets a bad rap because the economy did badly in the late 1970s because a whole host of decades long economic issues came to the fore around the time he took office and there's the weird iranian hostage thing. Had the economy done well carter would probably have won re-election.

perot would have ridden a wave of good economic growth post 1992 and be seen as closer to bill clinton than jimmy carter. The American electorate primarily evaluates presidents by which part of the business cycle their tenure in office covers.

I mean basically look at any of the major reforms clinton passed post-1994 (crime bill, welfare reform, telecom act, glass stealgal repeal etc) and ask yourself could Perot get support in congress passing the exact same stuff, I'm guessing the answer is yes.
 
look at any of the major reforms clinton passed post-1994 (crime bill, welfare reform, telecom act, glass stealgal repeal etc) and ask yourself could Perot get support in congress passing the exact same stuff, I'm guessing the answer is yes.
Yes, but I also think it is possible that the Democrats will come back swinging, without Bill Clinton, and move somewhat leftward, and this, being in opposition to the essentially Republican agenda of Perot, might shift the nation in a completely different direction. Perot will fail to gratify the desire for change votes for both him and Clinton OTL signified in large part and this can benefit Democrats instead of Republicans.

To be sure this is no change in the partisan control of Congress, merely a change in that party's character, and so come 1996 we might see a reversed situation to OTL, a moderately leftish Democratic Congress opposing a moderately conservative Perot.

FWIW while there are similarities between Perot and Trump I think they are quite distinct in character. Perot has not only dignity but a bit of moral fiber, something beyond a self-proclaimed devotion to winning and the bottom line. It wasn't enough to make me trust him OTL but while I am aware of some kooky beliefs of his I would rather not have in the Oval Office if I had my druthers, I think he was not totally Orwellian and had some tethers to reality-based thinking. And indeed he probably has a soft ride economically.

So in particular I hope we could avoid disasters like repealing Glass-Steagal, which subsequent events showed was a badly needed piece of regulatory infrastructure.

One accomplishment Newt Gingrich was proud of OTL I hope we could avoid was gutting Congress's independent professional research capability. Over generations beginning with the early Cold War if not earlier, Congress had accumulated a bipartisan vetted, nonpartisan mass of researchers who could do impartial studies of issues at Congressional demand, for either party or properly bipartisan committees, presenting facts and analyses dispassionately for them to consider. By firing the majority of these painstakingly acquired staff, Gingrich rendered both parties dependent on agenda driven think tanks the majority of which are beholden to corporate funding. He privatized the truth that Congress members ought to be able to rely on to guide their decisions on behalf of their electoral constituency in other words.

If we can avoid that, Congress should be considerably smarter going down the line and it would probably be easier for politicians of both parties concerned to salvage bipartisanism to arrive at consensus agreements on many issues thus cementing the ongoing custom of collegial decisionmaking.

I believe Perot would have a genuine concern for the welfare of all Americans later generations of top leaders have tended to lack. I still think of him as dangerously Republican and dangerously neo-liberal but not as extreme as we have had to settle for OTL.

All this is in context of my also believing his election in 1992 would still be ASB, and if someone can plausibly engineer it, they would be laying down a TL drastically divergent from OTL 1991-1992, and the POD would probably have to go earlier than that.

More plausible is Bill Clinton, despite not being technically beholden to Perot's blessing, meeting with him either before or after the House elects him and coming to some sort of accord, in which Clinton gives Perot something solid and gets his blessing; considering the worse debacle the Republicans also would have suffered in that scenario, with Perot leading Bush in more states than Maine and maybe getting some EV himself, mostly at Bush's expense, Clinton launching his first term in visible and meaningfull collaboration with Perot would no doubt make me a bit sick to my stomach, but very possibly avoid the poisonous acrimony of OTL.

Say certain aspects of Clinton's first two years are notably more right wing than OTL, but others are actually perhaps more resolutely progressive. Perhaps Perot might examine Lani Guinier's credentials and proposals and approve them, and go to bat for her as Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, and it carries without Clinton backing down as OTL. Her proposals were dead opposite of the racist smear on her as "Quota Queen;" on the contrary she sought to implement voting mechanisms that would empower all minorities to a proportional degree automatically. Today I would recommend other methods but getting hers in operation might be quite good enough, or suggest later incremental improvements, and short circuit a generation of voter suppression and manipulation tactics. I have no idea what Perot's actual attitudes toward her or her ideas were of course, but her background included work for the Bush administration--in no way a positive from his point of view but he certainly might consider her in no way a partisan Democratic operative and thus give her a fair look. To be sure reading the article on her it claims Democratic Senators had their own misgivings, but these might have been orchestrated, and anyway it is possible a positive meeting with Perot might affect her presentation and demeanor in her meetings with Senate oversight.

Success in rendering key US elections more effectively democratic might also have a significant impact on the facts on the ground in subsequent races; I believe much of what is taken for revealed of the American character in our electoral outcomes is shaped by a highly distorted electoral system.
First past the post voting in general is, I have discovered, perhaps more than it is subject to dangerous manipulations, is also just plain flaky. I have become aware of five instances of state legislatures where the party that got more popular votes loses control of the state house to the one that got less in the past half decade or so--three in favor of Republicans, and two in favor of Democrats! In the latter two cases, one of them is my own state of Nevada, current session about to be replaced, and I have excellent reason to disbelieve this was due to machinations by Democrats. This causes me to revise my prior assumption the Republican victories were necessarily due to manipulations either, and conclude it is just a damn crapshoot when the parties are closely matched. Note I only have about 20-30 examples I have studied, because it is bloody difficult getting information about how the popular votes went collectively in state elections, by and large. It takes me a day or two to locate the data when it is published at all--as far as I can tell the State of Pennsylvania doesn't disclose it in any form and I don't know if I can trust Ballotopedia's presentation to be accurate based on some other samples where I can get the state data, and generally in whatever form I can get it, it takes a long time to process into useful form
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Elsewhere, Bill Clinton tipping his hand earlier about taking off the tie dye shirts and disclosing his right wing inclinations would probably be healthier for the Republic in the long run. Would it mean the Democrats must move right, with himself appealing to the need to work with Perot for national unity adduced in argument, or would at least some sectors of Democrats assert themselves by winning farther left? In any case, compromise and consensus building would be the order of the day. With Republicans understanding they got trounced fair and square, they might go all crazy shrill against Perot the backstabber, or might moderate instead of doubling down. I would expect some examples of all four shifts in both parties honestly in 1994.
 
The economy would have ensured whoever won in 1992 would win in 1996, even if they shot someone on the street or were caught in bed with a live girl/dead boy.
 
The economy would have ensured whoever won in 1992 would win in 1996, even if they shot someone on the street or were caught in bed with a live girl/dead boy.
Again, only if the combined actions of Presidential administration and Congress did not in some way impede or divert the basis of the boom.

The boom of the 1990s had a lot to do with the rise of the Internet and a major surge in PCs, and it would not be easy to derail or divert that. But I do think some of the few things Clinton, or rather the Democratic controlled Congress following Clinton's cues and suggestions, did, such as expanding the Earned Income tax credit for working families with children (mostly--I learned last year there are circumstances under which even an earner with no kids can benefit from it, much to my amazement, but the circumstances are pretty extreme to say the least) and modest shifting of tax burden to the richer brackets (something Clinton and the nation would pay for OTL with all sorts of Gingrich led counterproductive stuff) probably assisted the boom modestly. Vice versa it is not inconceivable a really dumb set of policies might have slowed it down significantly.

What I am saying here is that the reason people reelect officials in good times and throw them out in bad times is a somewhat irrational and emotional judgement about the political leaders being responsible for economic conditions, but to some extent they actually are responsible, and to that extent they can always help---or hinder! No one ever wants to hinder but all it takes is being on the other of some policy proponent politically to see how uninteneded consequences, or underestimated consequences that did not seem important to the other guy, will do more harm than good.

So it kind of matters what a President Perot would and would not sign off on, and what peculiar bees in his bonnet might drive him to do that might be counterproductive (or arguably lead to superior outcomes versus OTL--if only we could vote based on cross time comparisons of outcomes! As it is, when things go well we have very little idea outside of what ideological guidance tells us how it would have gone if someone else had made the key decisions). It matters whether the circumstances bringing him into office change the balance of power in Congress too; it matters what relationship he has to Congress and how much of the presumably Democratic dominated first two years of his term corpus of bills passsed he signs, and whether any of them he might veto can get overriden (not likely unless it is something a lot of Republicans must feel they have to support as well). It might be that if every governmental decision and action that helped the mid-90s boom were reversed it would still boom anyway, or it might gutter out and die--question being a matter of greatly detailed analysis.
 
I expected a roughly similar course to Clinton on 90% of stuff, besides NAFTA/GATT/the treaty that got us the DMCA from Perot tbh
 
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